Our decision to return to Guatemala to find information on the disappearance of my brother, Carlos, was prompted, in part, by the coming to light of the infamous Guatemalan Military Diary in 1999. In particular, the accidental discovery of over 70 million documents belonging to theGuatemalan National Police, in 2005, raised the possibility of our discovering in greater detail how the Guatemalan State used ‘intelligence information’ gathered by the police and military.

With this news, I decided there was no time to waste. We packed what equipment we had so as to be able to document our findings, hoping that these would support our campaign for justice for Carlos, Rosario and their family. At that point, we had little thoughts about making a feature-length documentary.

In respect to the legal fightback and awareness-raising by my family and others, against the historical and ongoing trauma and repression carried out by the Guatemalan and other Latin American regimes, the Internet has afforded us access to a wealth of significant documents which record the mechanisms and structures employed by the State against opposition movements such as that of which we were a part in Guatemala.

Amongst others, the National Security Archive in Washington DC has been a leading proponent of using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to access US Government and other documents, many of which detail that country’s role in training and support for successive repressive regimes guilty of the worst violations of human rights and genocide.

Among the documents found in the training files of Operation PBSUCCESS and declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency is a "Study of Assassination." A how-to guide book in the art of political killing, the 19-page manual offers detailed descriptions of the procedures, instruments, and implementation of assassination. "The simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination," counsels the study. "A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice."

“…A narrative history of the CIA's role in planning, organizing and executing the coup that toppled Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán on June 27, 1954. Cullather, now a diplomatic historian at the University of Indiana, worked on contract for one year with the CIA, where he was given access to thousands of agency records and secret operational files in order to produce this overview. The result is a surprisingly critical study of the agency's first covert operation in Latin America….

“…In Guatemala, of course, "Operation Success" had a deadly aftermath. After a small insurgency developed in the wake of the coup, Guatemala's military leaders developed and refined, with U.S. assistance, a massive counterinsurgency campaign that left tens of thousands massacred, maimed or missing.”[from the National Security Archive summary]

US Ambassador Chapin responds to two recent abductions in Guatemala City with a starkly worded cable about the responsibility of Guatemalan security forces in the disappearances, and the implications for U.S. policy in the country. "I pointed out the other day in San Salvador the conflict between the desire to incorporate Guatemala into an overall U.S. strategic concept for Central America, and the horrible human rights realities in Guatemala…” [from the National Security Archive summary]

The Guatemalan army, under the direction of military ruler Efraín Ríos Montt, carried out a deliberate counterinsurgency campaign in the summer of 1982, aimed at massacring thousands of indigenous peasants. This was substantiated by a comprehensive set of internal records presented as evidence to the Spanish National Court, and posted by the National Security Archive on its website. The files on “Operation Sofia” detail official responsibility for what the 1999 UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission determined were “acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people.”

Among the 359 pages of original planning documents, directives, telegrams, maps, and hand-written patrol reports, is the initial order to launch the operation issued on July 8, 1982 by Army Chief of Staff Héctor Mario López Fuentes. The records make clear that "Operation Sofía" was executed as part of the military strategy of Guatemala’s de facto president, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, under the command and control of the country’s senior military officers, including then Vice Minister of Defense Gen. Mejía Víctores. Both men are defendants in the international genocide case in front of the Spanish Court.

"Washington, D.C., May 20, 1999 -The Guatemalan military kept detailed records of its death squad operations, according to a document released by four human rights and public interest groups . The army log reveals the fate of scores of Guatemalan citizens who were "disappeared" by security forces during the mid-1980s. Replete with photos of 183 victims and coded references to their executions, the 54-page document was smuggled out of the Guatemalan army’s intelligence files and provided to human rights advocates in February, just two days before a UN-sponsored Truth Commission released its report on the country’s bloody 36-year civil war…”

Reporting on NSA Senior Analyst Kate Doyle’s expert witness testimony before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in the case of the Military Diary, during the Court’s 45th Extraordinary Session held in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The Military Diary or Death Squad Diary, is a Guatemalan military log book that proves the institution kept detailed records of its death squad operations.

In November of 2011, the remains of the first two victims associated with the logbook were identified, Amancio Samuel Villatoro and Sergio Saúl Linares Morales. Forensic anthropologists found the skeletal remains of all five men in the same gravesite on the Comalapa military base. According to the Death Squad Diary, the victims – kidnapped at different times under different circumstances – were secretly killed on the same day by their captors. The date of their executions is indicated in pencil, handwritten under their typed entries, as eg. March 29, 1984.

This series of documents reveals the role of the US Embassy in Guatemala City as providing ‘a conduit of information’ on repressive, murderous actions of the Government of Guatemala against members of the political Opposition movements, and the civilian population.

The US Government continued to provide military and financial assistance to successive Guatemalan military regimes over the period of the next two decades.

U.S. Public Safety Advisor John Longan, on temporary loan from his post in Venezuela, assists the Guatemalan government in establishing an urban “counter-terror” task force in the wake of a rash of 'kidnappings for ransom' by insurgent organizations. During meetings with senior military and police officials, Longan advises how to establish overt and covert operations, including the design of “frozen area plans” for police raids, setting up road blocks within the capital, and creating a “safe house” in the Presidential Palace to centralize information gathered on the kidnappings. Longan’s strategy calls for the CIA to launch a new, long-range intelligence program, and urges U.S. police advisors to increase their influence on Guatemalan security forces.

[Note: In the document, CAS is an acronym for “Covert Action Staff,” the operational arm of the CIA Station in Guatemala.]

The CIA Station in Guatemala City reports the secret execution of several Guatemalan “communists and terrorists” by Guatemalan authorities on the night of March 6, 1966. The victims - the leader of the Guatemalan Workers’ Party (PGT), Victor Manuel Gutiérrez, among them - are several of the more than 30 PGT members and associates abducted, tortured, and killed by Guatemalan security forces in March of 1966. This operation was a direct consequence of urban “counter-terror” tactics designed by U.S. officials in support of the Peralta government. It became notorious as the first case of forced mass “disappearance” in Guatemala’s history--indeed in all of Latin America—and served as one of the “Casos Ilustrativos” in the 1999 report of the historical Clarification Commission.

See also:Extract from The Echo about the USA intervention in Guatemala.Chapter 1: Interview with Prof. Noam Chomsky and the North American analyst Kate Doyle about the CIA-backed coup in Guatemala (1954), and the CIA's training of the Guatemalan military.